Quotulatiousness

November 12, 2012

Kelly McParland: US and French attitudes to affairs differ markedly

Filed under: Europe, France, Media, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:28

In the National Post, Kelly McParland contrasts the French reaction to affairs on the part of public officials with the American reaction:

In Paris they must be busily turning the pages now, looking for the rest of the story. Yes, OK, he had an affair … and? You mean that’s it? He didn’t murder her? Have three children that he kept in a secret location away from the press? Involve her in sex games with crowds of similarly liberated-minded partners? They had an affair and he has to quit as head of the CIA? Mon dieu, these Americans. Four hundred years in the New World and they’ve barely moved on from the Puritans. Look, they’re even shocked that the other woman appeared on television “sporting bare, toned arms”. What did they expect, a chador?

France has moved on marginally from the days when President Francois Mitterrand could have a whole secret second family, and no one mentioned it in public because it wouldn’t be polite. Now the press leaps happily onto news of sexual licence in the halls of power. Unlike the U.S., they just don’t condemn it, as long as no one is physically abused. The latest instance – they don’t even use the world scandal, because in France it isn’t — relates to the former justice minister, Rachida Dati, who is suing one of the country’s wealthiest men to try and force him to admit he’s the father of her new daughter. The case is a bit complicated because, as Ms. Dati attests, she has “a complicated private life.” That would include, according to the attorney for Dominique Desseigne, the alleged father, having eight lovers in the year she fell pregnant, “including a television broadcaster, a minister, a Qatari attorney-general and a brother of the former president Mr Sarkozy,” reports the French newspaper Le Monde.

Nicolas Sarkozy was the president at the time, and Ms. Dati’s boss. He wasn’t likely to be butting into her private life, though, having given up his own wife in favour of singer/model Carla Bruni. Ms. Bruni has recently been offering marital advice – as in “get married for Cripe sakes” – to Valerie Trierweiler, current First Partner-for-a-While to President Francois Hollande, who has four children by a previous Main Partner, Ségolène Royal. (Ms. Royal is only a Main Partner rather than a First Partner because Hollande wasn’t president at the time.) Dumping the mother of your four children for an uppity newspaper columnist like Ms. Trierweiler might offend sensibilities, but M. Hollande never married Ms. Royal either, so no big deal. Nonetheless Ms. Trieweiler has become deeply unpopular since moving into the presidential palace, because she refuses to give up her day job as a columnist and because she’s been rude to Ms. Royal. The messy sex stuff has nothing to do with it.

Compared to the Bacchanalia of French politics, the Petraeus “scandal” is like a high-school tiff over who gets to wear the football captain’s pin to the Prom.

Vikings defence emerges from witness protection program to mug Detroit 34-24

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

All the early signs of team collapse were visible: top cornerback out for several weeks with a broken arm, top receiver out for at least a week with an ankle injury, team morale fading after two ugly losses… and in spite of all that, the Vikings managed to pull a quite convincing win out of the hat. The top performance for the Vikings was Adrian Peterson’s 171 yards on 27 carries, while Detroit’s Megatron (Calvin Johnson) tallied 207 yards receiving on 12 catches. The most pleasant surprise of the day was the very impressive debut of wide receiver Jarius Wright, whose first NFL reception went for 54 yards and his second reception was the first TD of the game.

Christopher Gates at the Daily Norseman:

Had I told you earlier on in the day that not only would the Minnesota Vikings not have Percy Harvin for their game this afternoon against the Detroit Lions, but they would complement that by allowing Calvin Johnson to go over 200 yards receiving and to get just his second touchdown reception of the year (and his first from Matthew Stafford) … how many points would you have told me the Vikings would lose by?

Well, it turns out that they didn’t lose at all. In fact, they won the game by ten points, with the Lions getting a touchdown towards the end of the game for purely cosmetic purposes. Sure, Stafford got over 300 yards passing, and Johnson went berzerk as I mentioned … but in the end, it didn’t matter. The Minnesota Vikings did what they had to do when they needed to do it, and they swept a divisional opponent for the first time since 2009 as a result. So how did it happen?

The BBC’s nightmare scenario

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Emily Bell outlines the existential crisis the BBC suddenly finds itself embroiled in:

[BBC director general George] Entwistle’s resignation on Saturday was directly linked to a report broadcast by Newsnight on November 2 that misidentified a public figure allegedly involved in a child abuse scandal. The report, connected to an already broiling scandal, did not make things any worse, theoretically, for Thompson. But the BBC he left is now facing a very serious challenge to its future and independence.

The turmoil at the BBC started with a revelation involving a now-dead TV presenter and public figure, Jimmy Savile, who is accused of molesting possibly hundreds of children. US commentators have tried to explain Savile to the domestic audience, but there really is no parallel here. […] The allegations against Savile were being investigated by Newsnight last year, but its editor, Peter Rippon, decided not to run the investigation on the grounds that the evidence was not sound enough. Subsequently, rival broadcaster ITV pulled together a documentary carrying the allegations against Savile, making the BBC’s decision not to run the original piece seem both flawed and possibly compromised. Just as Entwistle succeeded Thompson as director general, the story of how the BBC had shelved its piece broke.

[. . .]

The most preposterous and fitting denouement to the whole horrible affair happened when, in an attempt to prove itself institutionally robust, Newsnight commissioned a second piece into another child abuse scandal. The show broadcast its investigation on November 2, conducted with the London-based Bureau for Investigative Journalism. Including details about an alleged pedophile, the report led to the misidentification of a former member of a Conservative government as being involved in a North Wales care-home scandal after the central witness interviewed misidentified his abuser. Failing to conduct a sufficiently thorough cross-checking of the victim’s evidence, or even to show him a picture of the former politician, were basic journalistic errors. To make matters worse, the Bureau’s editorial head, Iain Overton, had foreshadowed the “exclusive” by tweeting about it earlier in the day. So in scrambling to address the perception that it was timid in breaking stories about pedophilia, Newsnight’s overcompensation has led to a potentially ruinous situation of the BBC creating false rumors.

There are two separate issues in play with all this that have become toxically intertwined. One is the existence of an endemic culture of child abuse in a number of British institutions, and the other is about the editorial independence and journalistic future of the BBC.

Firefox users more likely to stay on old version longer than other browser users

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:47

John Leyden summarizes the recent findings about how quickly users update their web browsers after a new release:

Nearly one in four netizens are using outdated web browsers and are therefore easy pickings for viruses and exploit-wielding crooks.

The average home user upgrades his or her browser to the latest version one month after it is released, according to a survey of 10 million punters. Two thirds of those using old browser software are simply stuck on the version prior to the latest release — the remaining third are using even older code.

Internet Explorer is the most popular browser (used by 37.8 per cent of consumers), closely followed by Google Chrome (36.5 per cent). Firefox is in third place with 19.5 per cent.

Firefox users tend to be the worst for keeping up to date with new software releases, according to the survey by security biz Kaspersky Lab. The proportion of users with the most recent version installed was 80.2 per cent for Internet Explorer and 79.2 per cent for Chrome, but just 66.1 per cent for Firefox.

Old-codgers Internet Explorer 6 and 7, with a combined share of 3.9 per cent, are still used by hundreds of thousands of punters worldwide.

November 11, 2012

The natural lifecycle of a “monopoly”

Filed under: Asia, China, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:53

In Forbes, Tim Worstall celebrates the natural end to a “monopoly” — the quasi-monopoly of Chinese exports of rare earth compounds:

These past several years I’ve been shouting to all who would listen that while China does indeed have a stranglehold on current production of rare earths that’s not something that we really need to worry about. For the important thing about rare earths is that they’re not rare (nor earths either). There are plenty of deposits around and we can get all we need from other areas of the world if we should care to.

    The same cannot be said of Kuantan, the Malaysian locale where Lynas plans to build a rare earth processing plant, a type of facility residents and Australian supporters say, in online campaigns, will result in “millions of tonnes of toxic radioactive waste left behind”.

    Residents took Lynas to court in Malaysia, resulting in the suspension of its operating licence. That decision was overturned yesterday.

Lynas is the company desiring to mine the Mt. Weld deposit (a nice rich one it is too). They are going to separate the RE concentrate at that plant in Malaysia. There’s been a vocal campaign against the licensing of that extraction plant and Lynas has, as above, just succeeded in over-turning a previous license refusal. Once up and operating fully the plant should supply some 20,000 tonnes a year of REs. This is a substantial portion of demand outside China: it’s some 15% or so of entire global demand in fact.

And thus we again see how an apparent monopoly isn’t really all that much use to the supposed monopolist. It certainly was true that China supplied 95-97% of the world’s REs. Largely because they were willing to mine and supply at prices that made it not worth anyone else’s while to do so. But when they tried to constrain supply, to exercise that monopoly, instead of being able to exploit us all they simply encouraged the competition that destroys that monopoly.

Markets do indeed work and the only monopoly that can really be exploited is one that isn’t contestable. And an attempted monopoly in something as common as rare earths simply is contestable and thus cannot be exploited.

A major reason for Romney’s defeat

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:55

At Reason, Sheldon Richman explains one of the major reasons Mitt Romney’s campaign for president fell short of victory:

Romney couldn’t call Obama to account because he fundamentally agreed with most of what the president did. He could hardly have substantively criticized Obama’s fiscal record: Romney had little specific to say about cutting the government’s deep-in-deficit budget, and he even proposed to leave education and other federal spending intact. While Romney talked about cutting income-tax rates, he emphasized that he had no intention of cutting government revenues, which represent resources extracted from the private economy. He proposed only revenue-neutral tax “reform.”

While Romney promised to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, the architect of Massachusetts’ Romneycare was hardly in a position to offer a fundamental critique. The insurance mandate is the linchpin of Obamacare, but since Romneycare has the same mandate, what could the Republican candidate say? His weak federalist defense of state mandates versus national mandates sounded more like a rationalization. Moreover, Romney doesn’t understand what is wrong with America’s overpriced health-care system: the pervasive, monopolistic government privilege and regulation in the medical and insurance industries at both the state and federal levels. There is no free market in health care — something Romney does not get. As a result, he made the fatal mistake of implying that a partial repeal of Obamacare is all that is needed.

He also endorsed economic regulation, just to a vaguely lesser extent than what Obama favors. That only muddled the message. Romney showed no sign of understanding the relationship between regulation and privilege, which usually go hand in hand. So it’s not enough to favor deregulation; a true advocate of the free market favors “de-privileging” as well.

The biggest pass Obama got was on foreign policy and civil liberties, where his record has been horrendous. Of course, Romney could make no principled criticism because he basically approves of the record, though he claimed Obama hasn’t been aggressive enough.

As early as August, this lack of actual substantive differences between the candidates had already become quite clear.

Royal Navy patrol sees off Spanish corvette

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

Gibraltar. Scenic and historic port at the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea. Oh, and ongoing point of friction between the UK and Spain:

A Royal Navy patrol boat has confronted a Spanish warship off the coast of Gibraltar in the latest and most serious clash over Britain’s territorial waters.

The Government has accused Spain of an ‘unlawful incursion’ after the Vencedora, a 288ft-long naval corvette, came within three miles of Gibraltar’s coast, apparently heading towards its port.

The Vencedora, which means ‘winner’, was equipped with Harpoon anti-ship missiles, multiple guns and torpedoes when it entered Gibraltar’s territorial waters on Wednesday afternoon.

The Spanish ship ignored radio warnings to leave the area, and HMS Scimitar, a seven-man patrol boat, was scrambled to intercept.

Gibraltar has been British territory since the early 1700’s, but the current Spanish government would like to change that. As the Wikipedia article points out, the inhabitants strongly prefer staying as British citizens to becoming Spanish:

In the 1950s, Franco renewed Spain’s claim to sovereignty over Gibraltar and restricted movement between Gibraltar and Spain. Gibraltarians voted overwhelmingly to remain under British sovereignty in the Gibraltar sovereignty referendum, 1967, which led to the passing of the Gibraltar Constitution Order in 1969. In response, Spain completely closed the border with Gibraltar and severed all communication links. The border with Spain was partially reopened in 1982, and fully reopened in 1985 prior to Spain’s accession to the European Community.

In a referendum held in 2002, Gibraltarians rejected by an overwhelming majority (99%) a proposal of shared sovereignty on which Spain and Britain were said to have reached “broad agreement”. The British government has committed itself to respecting the Gibraltarians’ wishes. A new Constitution Order was approved in referendum in 2006. A process of tripartite negotiations started in 2006 between Spain, Gibraltar and the UK, ending some restrictions and dealing with disputes in some specific areas such as air movements, customs procedures, telecommunications, pensions and cultural exchange.

Update, 13 November: And here they come again:

In memorium

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

A simple recognition of some of our family members who served in the First and Second World Wars:

The Great War

  • Private William Penman, Scots Guards, died 1915 at Le Touret, age 25
    (Elizabeth’s great uncle)
  • Private David Buller, Highland Light Infantry, died 1915 at Loos, age 35
    (Elizabeth’s great grandfather)
  • Private Walter Porteous, Northumberland Fusiliers, died 1917 at Passchendaele, age 18
    (my great uncle)
  • Corporal John Mulholland, Royal Tank Corps, died 1918 at Harbonnieres, age 24
    (Elizabeth’s great uncle)

The Second World War

  • Flying Officer Richard Porteous, RAF, survived the defeat in Malaya and lived through the war
    (my uncle)
  • Able Seaman John Penman, RN, served in the Defensively Equipped Merchant fleet on the Murmansk Run (and other convoy routes), lived through the war
    (Elizabeth’s father)
  • Private Archie Black (commissioned after the war and retired as a Major), Gordon Highlanders, captured at Singapore (aged 15) and survived a Japanese POW camp
    (Elizabeth’s uncle)
  • Elizabeth Buller, “Lumberjill” in the Women’s Land Army in Scotland through the war.
    (Elizabeth’s mother)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

November 10, 2012

“We’re here, we’re queer, and that shouldn’t really matter”

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:51

A profile of Conservative activist Roy Eappen:

You’re not really gay.

That’s a phrase that Roy Eappen hears quite a bit.

“I’m a gay Tory. That’s apparently not acceptable,” he says between giggles. “I find it kind of funny.”

Eappen is a bit of a curious case. Indian by birth, he now lives in Quebec, where he splits his time between advocating for a new centre-right consensus in the province, stumping for the federal Conservatives and hobnobbing with Republican heavyweights down south. A quick Google search will turn up pictures of Eappen alongside George W Bush, Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan.

But he’s becoming increasingly known for his parties.

Recently, Eappen was in Tampa for the Republican National Convention, where he helped organize for conservative gay group GOProud. Before that, he started the Fabulous Blue Tent party for the Conservative convention here in Canada. “It’s a funny little secret that Tory parties all over the world are full of gay people,” he says.

Eappen’s recent 800-person party in Ottawa was met with accolades and positive reviews from partygoers and pundits. It attracted Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and MP Rick Dykstra, as well as staffers from all parties. Even Laureen Harper was supposed to come, but she couldn’t make it.

He laughs again. “She’s an Evangelical Christian, and she’s cool with us.”

What Ataturk accomplished to create modern Turkey

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Middle East, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

History Today posted that today is the anniversary of the death of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the man who carved modern Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman empire:

Mustapha Kemal Pasha was given the honorific title ‘father of the Turks’ at the height of a revolution which he was pushing forward intuitively and idiosyncratically, there being no precedent for such a fundamental sea change in a Muslim state.

Inevitably, it took someone standing outside the Islamic tradition of Ottoman Turkey to create a new state out of Anatolia — rising from the wreck of the empire. But as The Times was to say in its obituary, this was a man of extraordinary qualities; a Cromwell of the Middle East and also a maverick with an almost feminine subtlety in handling crises on the path to supreme power. He had an iron will and displayed single-mindedness when it came to ensuring the security of the state, even to hanging former confederates who plotted against his revolution.

Ataturk was born of an Albanian mother in Salonika and, without connections followed a military career in which, after being involved with the Young Turks reformist movement, he made his name in 1915 by rushing reinforcements to the Gallipoli beach-head and holding the ANZAC assault.

[. . .]

The Kemalists formed a provisional government in the small town of Ankara, in the middle of the desolate Anatolian plateau. On the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts the Greeks and Italians laid claim to what they regarded as their Asia Minor birthright, hoping to recreate some sort of classical empire. Kemal disabused the Greeks, who soon, of all the Allies hoping for a piece of Anatolia, were alone in arms against the nationalist forces. Halted in a blistering hot wilderness just short of Ankara, the Greeks, who had out-marched their supply lines, were outflanked and thrown back by Kemal’s outnumbered and ragged levies at the Sakaria river. A retreat became a headlong flight and the Greek forces joined their fellow nationals and the Armenians and foreigners who had formed the mercantile community of Smyrna, in a panic-stricken evacuation of the sacked and blazing port. Kemal is supposed to have indulged in a drinking orgy as Smyrna went up in flames — a Tartar conqueror’s celebration of total victory.

The Greeks quit the struggle and their sponsor, the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who had threatened armed British intervention backed by the fleet to keep Constantinople an open port under British protection, followed suit. The French and Russians signed separate treaties, giving the Kemalists recognition and aid.

The Two Scotts’ NFL picks (beat up on Buffalo edition)

Filed under: Football, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

It’s not nice to pick on poor, defenceless Buffalo … but that won’t stop either Scott:

Buffalo (plus 11) at New England

Scott Feschuk: As a Bills fan, I’ve so far refrained from criticizing QB Ryan Fitzpatrick, largely because he represents a genuine upgrade over guys like Trent Edwards and J.P. Losman. Remember Losman? You couldn’t find a more incompetent quarterback if you took Ryan Leaf’s brain, stuffed it inside Matt Leinart’s skull and handed the skull to JaMarcus Russell to throw 12 feet over the head of a wide-open receiver. But enough is enough. Fitzpatrick just isn’t getting it done and the fact that he graduated from Harvard and probably knows how to use a protractor does not make up for the fact HE NO CAN THROWY MR. OBLONG. Right now, the only thing that will save 2012 for Buffalo fans is if it turns out that the Bills’ season syncs up perfectly with Dark Side of the Moon. Fingers crossed. Pick: Buffalo.

Scott Reid: Breaking News — the Buffalo Bills, whose defence has allowed an NFL all-time high forty squinjillion points, has fired its entire defensive team and replaced them with the Muppets and Wall-E.

Head coach Chan Gailey explained that, while unconventional, the technically lifeless Muppets would still represent a substantial upgrade to most positions. “Gonzo played a little Division II ball before he got into show biz and Kermit has great instincts around the ball — as long as we can keep that pig away.” New free safety Animal had this to add in an interview with WNY Sports, “Lurrghh.” In other news, the Bills denied that they’ve been negotiating with Tennessee for the rights to field goal kicker Stuart Little. Pick: New England.

Minimum wage and “living wage”

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:47

Tim Harford discusses the image and reality of Britain’s campaign for “living wages”:

Living wage?

The minimum wage, £6.19 an hour for those 21 and over, is a legal obligation. The living wage, £8.55 an hour in London and £7.45 an hour elsewhere, is the result of a very successful publicity campaign and can count Ed Miliband and Boris Johnson among its advocates. There are no legal sanctions for paying less than the living wage, although Mr Miliband did announce plans to “name and shame” those companies who didn’t. Apparently that is helpful, because “name” rhymes with “shame”.

Why do campaigners say that you can’t live on the minimum wage?

Try living on £6.19 an hour and see how you get on.

For an economist you’re getting very high-minded all of a sudden.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to point out that £6.19 an hour isn’t a lot of money. £8.55 an hour isn’t a lot of money, either, but a lot of people have to get by on less. Unfortunately we economists have to ask awkward questions — for instance, whether these campaigns are likely to help people without much income.

[. . .]

Perhaps we should just raise the legal minimum wage to the same level as the living wage.

Perhaps. Perhaps we should raise the legal minimum wage to a £100m an hour. I think if we did we’d find unemployment might rise. A minimum wage does two things. It will shift money from employers in an imperfectly competitive market to low-paid workers and it will induce some employers to sack workers, even if both employer and employee would prefer a deal struck at an illegally-low wage rate. There’s a case that for the good of low-paid workers, there should be no minimum wage at all. There should be one but it needs to be modest if it isn’t to cause too much unemployment.

Is there any evidence on the right level?

There’s lots, and it is mixed, but on balance it’s in favour of the idea that if you raise the cost of employing people, fewer people will be employed. It is worth bearing in mind that, for a lowly paid worker shifting from job to job, having less work available but at a high hourly rate, isn’t a bad deal. The concern has to be that certain types of people — especially young unskilled workers — will be shut out completely and denied the chance to learn on the job.

“Carbon sequestration in peatland may be one of the main reasons why ice age conditions have occurred time after time”

Filed under: Environment, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Overall, global cooling is far more to be feared than global warming … and we may be seeing the conditions that would create a new ice age in the near future:

A group of Swedish scientists at the University of Gothenburg have published a paper in which they argue that spreading peatlands are inexorably driving planet Earth into its next ice age, and the only thing holding back catastrophe is humanity’s hotly debated atmospheric carbon emissions.

“We are probably entering a new ice age right now. However, we’re not noticing it due to the effects of carbon dioxide,” says Professor of Physical Geography Lars Franzén, from the Department of Earth Sciences at Gothenburg uni.

[. . .]

The scientists have calculated that the potential is there for Swedish peatlands to triple in extent, enormously increasing their carbon sink effect. By extrapolating to include the rest of the world’s high-latitude temperate areas – the parts of the globe where peatland can expand as it does in Sweden – they project the creation of an extremely powerful carbon sink. They theorise that this is the mechanism which tends to force the Earth back into prolonged ice ages after each relatively brief “interglacial” warm period.

“Carbon sequestration in peatland may be one of the main reasons why ice age conditions have occurred time after time,” says Franzén.

With no other factors in play, the time is about right for the present interglacial to end and the next ice age to come on. Indeed, Franzén and his crew think it has barely been staved off by human activity

Caution should be exercised with this as with all climate-model-based predictions: our models are still not good enough to be dependable, so this is no more something to panic about than the “global warming” scare of the last decade. It is something to consider and to try to develop better models and collect more data to support or contradict the findings.

November 9, 2012

FEMA’s embarrassing record

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:38

Shikha Dalmia on the odd phenomenon that FEMA is just flat-out terrible at doing the job it’s supposed to do — co-ordinating emergency relief efforts — but is still beloved by big-government fans:

Hurricane Sandy hadn’t even touched down when liberals started blowing kisses to FEMA, or Federal Emergency Management Agency, the federal disaster relief agency. A New York Times editorial declared that the impending storm proved that the country needs FEMA-style “Big Government” solutions more than ever. Salon, New Republic and other liberal outfits heartily agreed.

Why do liberals love FEMA so much? Certainly not for its glorious track record. Rather, FEMA has been a great vehicle for expanding the welfare state.

FEMA’s tragic missteps after Katrina earned it well-deserved disgrace. The Times blames those on the Bush administration, whose anti-government philosophy supposedly gutted FEMA. President Obama, the argument goes, straightened things out, and Americans should now “feel lucky” that the agency is there for them. Without it, local and state authorities wouldn’t be able to coordinate where “rescuers should go, where drinking water should be shipped, and how to assist hospitals that have to evacuate.”

So how did the new and improved FEMA perform post-Sandy, a storm for which it had lots of advance warning? Not so well.

It didn’t set up its first relief center until four days after Sandy hit — only to run out of drinking water on the same day. It couldn’t put sufficient boots on the ground to protect Queens residents from roving looters. The Red Cross — on whom FEMA depends for delivering basic goods — left Staten Island stranded for nearly a week, prompting borough President Jim Molinaro to fume that America was not a Third World country. But FEMA’s most egregious gaffe was that it arranged for 24 million gallons of free gas for Sandy’s victims, but most of them couldn’t lay their hands on it.

Solving the “tax haven problem” … with military intervention

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:30

Radley Balko suggested that this is insanity. I agree, but as Dan Mitchell explains, it’s being bruited about by people who should know far, far better:

A former bureaucrat from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development actually called for the forcible annexation of low-tax jurisdictions, writing in the Financial Times that, “Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man should simply be absorbed lock, stock and barrel into the UK…Andorra, Monaco and Liechtenstein should be given the choice of ending bank secrecy or facing annexation.”

He wasn’t quite so belligerent about Switzerland, perhaps because all able-bodied male citizens have fully automatic assault weapons in their homes. But he did urge financial protectionism against the land of chocolate, yodeling, and watches.

What a bizarre attitude. It’s apparently okay for certain countries to persecute – or even kill – ethnic minorities, religious minorities, political dissidents, homosexuals, and other segments of their populations. Very rarely do people like Mr. Buiter call for annexation or sanctions against such loathsome regimes.

But if a nation has low taxes and a strong human rights policy on financial privacy, then cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.

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